If the most famous aphorism in Washington — that all politics is local — is true, then the neighborhood post office is about as political as it gets. And it’s been that way for a long time.

“Politics have been tied in with the postal service from the very beginning,” said Nancy Pope, a historian at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum.

Perhaps that’s why, barely a month after the bitterly partisan, scorched-earth debt ceiling/deficit fight, Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill vow bipartisan cooperation to keep the perpetually strapped U.S. Postal Service — already considering closing 3,300 offices to offset billions it expects to lose this year and next — from sinking in a sea of red ink.

The USPS, which has lost an average of roughly $7.5 billion a year for the past two years, is maxed out on its $12 billion line of credit with the Treasury Department and could default on a $5.5 billion payment it must make to a retiree health benefits fund by month’s end. That’s on top of the estimated $7 billion to $8 billion the USPS is projected to lose this year.

There’s no doubt that Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe, postal workers unions and lawmakers consider the situation a full-blown fiscal crisis; the website for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), has a clock ticking down the days and hours until the Postal Service runs out of money.

Yet given the stakes for lawmakers and the public, the prospect of financial doomsday seems unlikely.

The Postal Service is “almost as old as the country,” said Frederic Rolando, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, who believes lawmakers and Donahoe will find an answer.

Rolando and USPS-affiliated unions are betting that after a series of nasty, politically damaging fights on Capitol Hill over the federal checkbook, Republicans and Democrats will “need something they can do together politically, because the public can’t stand them” and is infused with the same sense of expectation about receiving mail that farmers had in the 19th century when they pressed Congress to begin rural free delivery.

But in recent years, the anger Rolando sees as being directed at Congress has been more often aimed at the postal service. The flip side of the USPS’s mom-and-apple-pie image has been perennial consumer dissatisfaction with slow delivery, lackluster service, along with stereotypes of an impenetrable bureaucracy and lazy civil servants waiting on fat federal pensions. That’s besides the tasteless jokes about “going postal” on one’s co-workers.

Complaints from customers took on a harder edge as delivery services like UPS and FedEx ate into USPS’s monopoly and its profits. At the same time, electronic communication — email, online bill paying and cheap long-distance calling plans — rendered first-class mail all but obsolete.

Even after the Post Office became the United States Postal Service in 1971 and was no longer a federal agency, Congress maintained a measure of control over USPS, requiring lawmakers’ approval for any changes to the mandate of civil servants providing universal mail delivery at no profit. And nothing motivates Congress more than a financial emergency that has a direct impact on constituents, nearly all of whom have daily contact with “snail mail” at home or in the workplace.

The rhetoric coming from Capitol Hill last week reflected that sense of urgency.

Convening a hearing last week of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) warned that, without quick action, a collapse of the Postal Service could be at hand, “and that’s the last thing our country needs right now.”

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the committee’s ranking Republican, couldn’t have agreed more: “We do face an urgent task, and that is to save the icon of American society and an absolute pillar of the American economy.”

Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, the top committee Democrat, harmonized with both of them.

“Our job is to do what needs to be done to save this industry,” he declared, “even if it means making politically unpopular decisions.”

That last part is pretty much guaranteed. If Congress doesn’t act by Sept. 30, the Postal Service would enter default and service could collapse.

Donahoe, testifying before Lieberman’s committee, stressed that the USPS doesn’t need a blank check from Congress; instead, he wants Congress to empower him to end legally mandated Saturday delivery, slash 220,000 jobs from the 500,000-member USPS workforce and operate more like UPS and FedEx, his chief for-profit competitors — and close 3,300 post offices nationwide. Donahoe also told the committee he needs the government to refund $50 billion USPS overpaid to a civil service employees’ retirement fund.

But if he gets that power, it likely means at least one, and perhaps several, post offices will be shut down in dozens of congressional districts nationwide. Unlike ideologically tough votes on the debt ceiling or government benefits, actions with largely invisible consequences, shuttering a highly visible “icon of American society” — or dropping weekend delivery of a Social Security check or taking away altogether twice-weekly service to a rock-bound Maine island or a wind-swept prairie town — would garner negative attention, to say the least.

Even now, residents whose post offices will close in a current round of downsizing are complaining to their representatives, newspapers and anyone else who will listen. And while lawmakers may be unified on the goal of saving the Postal Service they are divided on how to do it.

Carper has written legislation that would mandate an overhaul, including cutting service to five days per week. But Collins, whose state includes far-flung towns that get mail as little as two days a week, insists that the six-day-a-week mandate should continue.

In the House, Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.), ranking member of a subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, would grant them a $7 billion rebate and urge reform, while Issa — whose website has an attack ad-style video condemning USPS management — rejects what he calls a “bailout” in favor of sweeping changes, including drastic workforce cuts, postal rate hikes and an increase in employee contributions to health and retirement benefits.

Lawmakers are facing a damned-if-you-do scenario: Give Donahoe what he says he needs and risk being blamed for a cut in services a lot of people would feel; or deny him and raise the odds the Postal Service will go down for the third time.

But Lynch,the son of a postal worker, said an outdated model has to change.

In his district alone, Lynch said, “there are small towns with four, five, six post offices. That’s not unusual,” he said. While the post office has downsized significantly, he said, it still hasn’t adapted to the digital age — or the fact that it’s delivering 40 billion fewer pieces of mail than it did just four years ago.

“I’m trying to find a way to meet the challenge,” said Lynch. “This is not going to be your grandfather’s post office going forward. It’s going to be something different.”